Not surprisingly, my Sunday column
raising the possibility that the successes of the gay marriage movement
might be having some modest influence on marriage’s overall decline
left liberals (and many others) unpersuaded. Kevin Drum has a usefully representative rebuttal,
whose three major points I think I’ll take up in separate posts. Here’s
the first, which dismisses the idea that the push for same-sex marriage
has tended to weaken the legal and cultural connection between marriage
and procreation by … blaming social conservatives for injecting that
supposed connection into the debate in the first place:

My
sense of the debate is that the procreation argument was introduced by
opponents of same-sex marriage, not supporters. Those advocating SSM
just wanted gays and lesbians to be able to marry each other. It was
opponents, after realizing that Old Testament jeremiads weren’t cutting
it any more, who began claiming that SSM should remain banned because
gays couldn’t have children. This turned out to be both a tactical and
strategic disaster, partly because the argument was so transparently
silly (what about old people? what about women who had hysterectomies?
etc.) and partly because it suggested that SSM opponents didn’t have any
better arguments to offer. But disaster or not, they’re the ones
responsible for making this into a cornerstone of the anti-SSM debates
in the aughts. Without that, I doubt that most ordinary people would
ever have connected gay marriage to procreation within straight
marriages in the first place. If this really has had an impact on
traditional marriage, the anti-SSM forces have mostly themselves to
blame.

The notion that nobody would have entertained
what Drum later calls the “esoteric” idea that marriage has an essential
link to the way that human beings procreate if desperate social
conservatives hadn’t grasped at it is apparently quite a popular view,
judging by the fact that other writers raised it on Twitter over the
weekend, and its popularity testifies to the way that the gay marriage
debate has encouraged a strange historical amnesia about the origins of
marriage law.
If gay marriage opponents had essentially
invented a procreative foundation for marriage in order to justify
opposing same-sex wedlock, it would indeed be telling evidence of a
movement groping for reasons to justify its bigotry. But of course that
essential connection was assumed in Western law and culture long before
gay marriage emerged as a controversy or a cause. You don’t have to look
very hard to find quotes (like the ones collected in this Heritage Foundation brief)
from jurists, scholars, anthropologists and others, writing
in historical contexts entirely removed from the gay marriage
debate, making the case that “the first purpose of matrimony, by the
laws of nature and society, is procreation” (that’s a California Supreme
Court ruling in 1859), describing the institution of marriage as
one “founded in nature, but modified by civil society: the one directing
man to continue and multiply his species, the other prescribing the
manner in which that natural impulse must be confined and regulated”
(that’s William Blackstone), and acknowledging that “it is through
children alone that sexual relations become important to society, and
worthy to be taken cognizance of by a legal institution” (that’s the
well-known reactionary Bertrand Russell).
Nor, perhaps more
importantly, is it difficult to find various traditional features of
marriage law that only make sense given the procreative understanding:
For instance, the granting, not of divorces, but annulments in
the case of marriages that weren’t or couldn’t be consummated — a
provision with deep roots in the common law tradition, and one that
remains in force today in contexts as diverse as California and England. (Current English annulment law went on the books all the way back in the dark medieval year of … 1973.)
Note,
too, that by saying that a marriage left unconsummated through coitus
is invalid, the common-law tradition makes precisely the distinction
that Drum (and many others) find so self-evidently ridiculous and assume
was obviously just invented for the gay marriage debate — a distinction
between relationships that involve the reproductive act and those that
don’t, with the former being valid marriages even when they’re infertile
and the latter not. This Robert George-esque view
of what is and isn’t marriage may or may not make sense, but it was
considered a perfectly reasonable way of drawing distinctions between heterosexual
relationships long before the homosexual claim to equal marriage rights
began to be advanced. Wise or not, it was a distinction inherited from
centuries of legal tradition, not invented as a made-up way to keep the
gays from contaminating marriage.
Now if Drum wants to argue that this “first purpose of matrimony” understanding was eroding
by the time the gay marriage debate began, and that its post-sexual
revolution erosion explains why marriage’s inherent connection to
reproduction went from being self-evident in 1971’s Baker v. Nelson
decision (the first major gay marriage ruling, whose invocation of
marriage’s necessary connection to the “procreation and rearing of children” nobody
at the time found “transparently silly”) to being contested in the
1990s and dismissed in the 2000s — well then, yes, he would have an
entirely plausible case. But he and others seem to be making a much
stronger claim than this — that basically nobody would have
imagined that the gay marriage debate had any implications for
marriage’s connection to procreation if the anti-gay marriage cause
hadn’t seized on the idea, and that the marriage-procreation link is (at
best) a medieval relic exhumed to serve the ends of homophobia, and at
worst just something invented by social conservatives out of animus and
desperation.
That so many people find this claim credible or even
self-evident is a small but potent example of exactly the two phenemona
that my column’s conclusion discussed: First, the way that gay marriage
inevitably has widening cultural ripple effects, in this case revising
not only the law itself but also the stories people tell about where
those laws came from and what they’re meant to do; and second, the way
that some of these ripple effects are making it almost impossible for
liberals to show magnanimity in victory, and accept the continued
existence of people and institutions that still take the older view of
what marriage is and means. After all, if that supposedly “older” view
was just invented by Clinton or Bush-era homophobes when their
Bible-thumping stopped working, then what’s to respect or even tolerate?
Once you’ve rewritten the past to make your opponents look worse, then
you’re well on your way to justifying writing them out of the future
entirely.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Stupidity: A Malady of the Cultural Elite

Nail meet Hammer, explains so many Catholics in name only, poorly educated and taught to "feel" not "think". If you notice Rush has said that for years, "what do you THINK, I don't care how you feel, feel is a sigh of intellectual laziness. Liberalism and the progressives constantly appeal to feelings and shout down intellectual debate

We live in something of a meritocracy,
and our rulers believe they are by far the most enlightened and
well-informed people who ever lived. For that reason they feel entitled
to make the aspirations of the present day, or what they consider such,
the compulsory standard for public life. They view the claim that there
are principles that transcend those aspirations as the sort of thing
that led to 9/11, and treat the past as worth considering only as
something to escape from or a foreshadowing of the glories of the
present.

Nonetheless, a variety of conditions, from the state of education and
the arts to that of political discussion, makes it evident that Western
society is growing less and less able to think clearly and effectively.
That’s a big problem, and one that’s hard to deal with, because it is
difficult to cure oneself of mindlessness. Still, we should do our best
to understand what’s going on.
A basic part of the problem is that the kind of meritocracy we have
leads to stupidity. Its effect is that local and subordinate groupings
are deprived of talent and respect, and the leadership at the top
becomes unable to think or function outside established understandings.
The people at the top mostly went to the same highly competitive
schools, where they were all told the same things, and it’s taken all
their effort and devotion to get where they are today. The result is
that they’re absorbed in their social function and setting, and would
find it very difficult to adopt an independent perspective if the desire
to do so ever entered their heads.
The results are evident in our public life. How often do our leaders
say or write anything that would be of interest if a different name were
attached? Can anyone imagine Hilary Clinton thinking something she
isn’t supposed to think? And to get to the bottom line, do our rulers
give the impression that they know what’s going on or what to do about
it?
Naturally, meritocracy isn’t the only culprit. There are other
factors at work that also stem from the nature of a society ruled by
technology and technocratic ideals. Their effect is that the
understandings that guide thought are becoming increasingly
nonfunctional:

Electronic diversions train people out of the habit of consecutive
thought. Tweets, texting, and multitasking mean discussions never get to
the point and are hardly discussions at all.

Rejection of transcendent standards leads to denial of the good,
beautiful, and true in favor of rhetoric and power. That means the
subordination of thought to politics, propaganda, and partisanship.

Bureaucracy, commerce, and the media absorb functions once performed
by individuals, families, and tradition. Instead of the arts of life,
which require thought, we have consumer goods, social programs, and
industrially-produced pop culture. The result is that thought becomes
less important as a day-to-day matter.

Thought requires engagement with reality. Electronic entertainment
and the distance between cause and effect in a complex globalized
society mean people do not engage reality, while skepticism as to truth
means they consider it theoretically impossible to do so.

A technological approach to society means mechanical unity of
components, and thought and discussion are not mechanical. Common
histories, understandings, and commitments, as well as freedom of
association, are necessary for complex and subtle activities such as
scholarly inquiry and speculative thought, and technocracy disrupts such
things.

Thought depends on recognizing and applying patterns, and technology
rejects pattern recognition in favor of simple relations of cause and
effect. To make matters worse, relating individual cases to patterns
means stereotyping and discrimination. Ideals of diversity and
inclusiveness, which draw their institutional strength from the
technocratic desire to turn people into interchangeable components, thus
require suppression of the habits of mind that make thought possible.

Thought also depends on standards of cogency, which are disfavored
because they are at odds with diversity. People want to include
marginalized voices, so they feel called upon to treat thoughts
nonjudgmentally, as long as they are politically acceptable.

In any event, standards require effort, so they’re at odds with
consumerism, comfort, and lifestyle libertarianism, and the
technological outlook makes those the goals of life. Such an attitude
may help explain the recent startling decline of academic achievement among thoroughly assimilated Jewish and Japanese Americans.

If America and the West are getting stupider as a result of the basic
nature and tendency of our society, including the measures that have
been adopted to increase the intelligence with which it is run, we have
to ask about the future. Some say that the no-nonsense Chinese will take
over everything, others that genetic engineering will save the day,
still others predict a period of general disorder, something like the
Middle East but on a global scale.
It seems unlikely the Chinese will take over, since they have their
own problems. For starters, selective abortion and the one-child rule
mean they’re going to have a huge population of young men with no
prospect of marriage, and an even huger population of elderly people
with no one to support and look after them. Nor does genetic engineering
look like a cure-all for stupidity, if only because the problems are
mostly cultural and grow out of an understanding of man and society that
reduces human life to an engineering problem. So the obvious outcome of
present trends in the West is growing incoherence of thought, leading
to nonfunctional public life and a retreat into inward-turning networks
of survival. We’ve tried to turn Iraq into Minnesota, but it’s more
likely we’ll turn Minnesota into Iraq.
What’s needed, then, is a basic change of cultural direction that
allows better things to develop. That’s not impossible. Intelligence is
more functional than stupidity, and cooperation works better than chaos,
so why shouldn’t they have a competitive advantage?
What’s caused the problem is the habit of viewing the world
exclusively as a mechanical system. That approach has been fruitful in
the physical sciences, but it has no place for intelligence, meaning, or
agency, so it defeats itself when applied to the world as a whole. It
can deal with protons, but not with physics as a science carried on by
intelligent human beings, so in the long run it undermines even science.
Man is rational, at least to the extent that if he drives
intelligence and meaning out of his understanding of the world he will
eventually drive them out of his way of life. What we need, then, is a
fundamental change of understanding that makes intelligence and meaning
integral to how things are. To be functional and stable the new
understanding must be concrete enough to give determinate results, and
to deserve confidence it must have a way that can be counted on to
settle disruptive questions.
That sounds a lot like Catholicism. Things haven’t been going well
for the Church lately, but we’re not the only ones with problems. In the
long run basic principles determine results, so if we can remain true
to what we are then even from a purely this-worldly standpoint we have
advantages that the forces of secular modernity can’t match. The
conversion of the Roman Empire became final when thinkers like Augustine
found they needed the Church to make sense of life and the world. What
works best wins out, so there are reasons to expect something similar to
happen again.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Just in case you have the wrong impression of St Francis, he did NOT go around prancing among the birds and wildflowers hugging everyone and everything,
he was a REAL piece of work, this could be very interesting. Hopefully he will "kick some butt" if you'll pardon the slang, however it is needed in the Curia and the church as a whole.

... might be the only viable solution to America's low birth rate problem. They get the vapors, they might be vapid, and Harry vapes.

Listen to the desperation as they sidetrack into the topic of whether
the children of conservative religionists will veer into decently
acceptable liberalism (and become... tattoo artists!). They never
return to the issue of whether religion is needed to keep the
population going into the future. If the offspring don't maintain the
conservative values that caused their parents to have children, how do
you get the next generation?

About Me

I am a 54 year old, married father of 5, one in heaven, My Father and I operate a certified organic dairy farm in southern Mercer County Ohio, made my first communion in the 1st grade, at St Joseph Catholic Church,located in the community of Egypt, Ohio (smallest parish in the Cincinnati diocese) where all of my ancestors are buried, the land for the church was donated by my Family, Our parish was so small that we made our 1st communion in the first grade to increase the supply of mass servers. I have fond memories of the Latin Mass as a server, I am now just more of a semi trad Catholic voicing his complaint about happy clappy Catholicism, vapid priests and polyester nightmare nuns that are bringing down the Church. Saints in Heaven pray for us and Angels defend us.